Ngo Dinh Diem
Ngo Dinh Diem was the man the United States chose to prove that a non-communist Vietnam was possible, and his failure to be one persuaded it to have him removed. He was born in 1901 into a Catholic mandarin family from the centre of the country, a lineage that made him doubly unrepresentative of a population that was overwhelmingly Buddhist and had been ruled from Saigon by the French. He was devout to the point of considering the priesthood, rose young through the imperial administration, and was made interior minister under Bao Dai in 1933, resigning within months when the French refused the reforms he demanded. That resignation was the making of him: for two decades he was the rare Vietnamese nationalist who was neither a communist nor a French client, and he spent the early 1950s in exile in the United States cultivating the Catholic and congressional patrons who would later insist he was indispensable. Bao Dai appointed him prime minister in June 1954, weeks before the Geneva settlement partitioned the country, and within a year he had broken the criminal and sectarian armies that ran Saigon. In October 1955 he deposed Bao Dai in a referendum that returned him ninety-eight per cent of the vote and rather more votes in Saigon than there were registered voters, and proclaimed himself president of a Republic of Vietnam. He then refused the reunification elections Geneva had scheduled for 1956, on the accurate but self-serving ground that no free vote was possible in the north, and set about governing through his family. His younger brother ran the secret police and a clandestine party; another brother was archbishop of Hue; a third ran the central provinces as a fief; and his brother's wife served as the unmarried president's first lady and its most quotable voice. Land reform was reversed in favour of the landlords, peasants were moved into fortified settlements they had not asked for, and a 1959 law let military tribunals impose death sentences without appeal. The regime's Catholic favouritism turned into its undoing in 1963, when troops fired on Buddhists in Hue for flying their own flag, a monk burned himself to death at a Saigon intersection in front of a photographer, and special forces raided the pagodas of every major city. Washington concluded that Diem would not part with his brother and that the war could not be won with either of them, and told its ambassador it would not stand in the way of the generals. They took Saigon on 1 November 1963 and shot him the next morning in the back of an armoured personnel carrier. He was replaced by nine governments in eighteen months, which is the strongest argument ever made for him.
- Lived: 1901 CE – 1963 CE
- Nationality: Vietnamese
- Roles: head_of_state, authoritarian_leader
